Although computer systems are currently in commercial use in a wide variety of different applications, such as for controlling industrial processes or for information storage for retrieval as in the creation and searching of databases, and network communications, many current systems provide output in a form dictated by the system itself rather than in the language of the user. Similarly current systems may also require instructions and information to be input in a form which is again dictated by the system itself rather than the language of the user.
A prerequisite for a computer system which can process natural language as output and/or input is an efficient language processing method for converting a representation of the meaning of an output in a natural language to an output in that language, and preferably an efficient processing method for converting input in the input language into a representation of the meaning thereof. Although considerable research has been carried out in this area, the prior art has proposed systems known as language interfaces which have failed to meet the above indicated requirements.